Electrical power distribution systems generally include high voltage electrical conductors that span a geographic area to distribute electrical power to various customers in that geographic area. These electrical power distribution systems also include various monitoring devices and event reporting systems to report occurrences of various events that may affect the operation of the electrical distribution system. Reported events include, for example, indications of power outage in various portions of the electrical distribution system, occurrences of events, such as lightning, in the environment in an area served by the electrical distribution system, other events, or combinations of these. In general, indications of these various different types of events are reported by different systems.
Some types of reported events include events that are likely to have resulted from occurrences of excessive electrical current flow in the conductors of the electrical power distribution system. In some examples, the excess electrical current is caused by a line fault in the electrical conductors. Examples of such line faults include a short circuit or lower impedance path between two electrical phases at a point in the electrical distribution system, or a short circuit or lower impedance path between a conductor and ground at a point in the electrical distribution system.
In order to protect the electrical distribution system and maintain electrical service to as many customers as possible in the event of a line fault, protection devices such as relays or other circuit interruption devices operate when excessive electric current flow is detected to disconnect the conductors in which the excessive electrical current flow was detected. Some of the various monitoring devices perform and report electrical current measurements when an excessive electrical current flow is detected. Different processing of these reported electrical current measurements made by different monitoring devices in some examples is able to provide different estimates of the location of a line fault that caused the excessive electrical current flow. The estimated location of the line fault is generally specified as a probability that a line fault exists at a particular location on a conductor of the electrical distribution system. In general, the different location estimates produced by the different processing of different measurements provide indicate that there is a substantial probability that the line fault occurred over a relatively large portion of electrical conductors of the electrical distribution systems. Due to the uncertainty of the location of the line fault, a physical inspection by service personnel is generally performed over the entire relatively large portion of the electrical conductors to find the exact location of the line fault.